To the person reading this, if anyone is alive to read it,

I hope you never have to experience the pain that I am. The yellow eyes have already set in and I can feel a fever coming about, but I’m not talking about the bite on my thigh. No, I’m talking about the gash in my heart, the wound that I fear that even after I die and my corpse reanimates, will never stop bringing me suffering.

They say that a walker goes into a murderous rage when faced with a problem they can’t solve, and I’m sure my corpse will do just the same when she opens the chest of another victim and sees that the heart of the prey does not have the same hole as the heart of the predator’s.

I’ve lost everyone I’ve loved in this outbreak, this damn outbreak they told us was going to last no more than a week. They said we could stay home, and they would have a vaccine in about a week. They did, but not for what they needed.

They told us it was an outbreak of West African rabies. So, of course, when someone said, “Here’s a vaccine for your rabies”, we all flocked forward. We were a bunch of goddamn fools.

My mother was the third person to die in the outbreak. We took her to the hospital on May 3rd. She died May 5th at 2:07 A.M., and reanimated at 3:45 A.M. The doctors let my little brother Jonas and I stay overnight seeing as we were her only family. When I heard her snarling, I left the sleeping Jonas on the pull-out sofa and got up to call the nurse in. But as the snarling increased, so did Jonas’s level of awareness.

By the time I got back into the room with my mom’s nurses, Jonas had already been scratched. With a swift shot to the head from a gun that nurses were now required to keep, Mom’s corpse dropped like a rock and after a quick shriek from Jonas, we were told to leave.

No one said a word about the scratch on my little brother’s shoulder. Of course, they wouldn’t. They had another case of the outbreak they had to cover up so no one would know that the vaccine was a hoax.

So when we got home, I was the one responsible for cleaning his scratch and putting a Spider-Man Band-Aid on it. The CDC told the citizens that the pathogen was contracted through blood and saliva. Nowhere in the letter did anyone say anything about scratches, nowhere.

The military shut down the hospital about a month before my brother started to show symptoms. The yellow eyes I had seen on his kindergarten teacher came first. The fever that I saw in the nine-year-old I babysat was next. The pale skin and coughing up blood I witnessed my boyfriend go through was after, until finally, the fever burned him out.

I've had to watch everyone I love die on some form of a soiled sofa.

Every shred of my normal life had left me. After I buried Jonas, I set off on my own once again, moving house to house looking for food, maybe somewhere to spend the night. I found people every now and again, gave them what I could so they could live another night, but I never kept anyone with me.

The more people I had around me, the higher the risk I had of dying, and even worse, of the hole in my heart getting any worse.

One week they told us. In one week we will have this entire pandemic under control and everyone can continue with their normal daily lives. That was four months and eight days ago. It was after my brother’s death that I realized that no matter what happened from that point on, my life would never be the same.

Now it's me on a dirty sofa, trying to fight the fever that's damn near burning me alive.

We were warned that those who are infected no longer have control of themselves. They don't know who they are, they don't know what they want or where they are. They just know that they need to eat.

So I hope that when you come across this letter, on the body of the predator, you know that my name was Rosaline Edwards, I was 20 years old, and I was born without a single aggressive bone in my body. I won't know what I'm doing once the infection finally takes me, but I know as of right now, I've never wanted to hurt a single person. This letter, scrawled crumpled paper towels with a child's marker, is my last prayer.

And I'm praying for you.